Can Steve Biddulph write a bad book or even a mediocre one? Can Rex
Finch of Finch Publishing publish one? Based on their track record of
excellence, you can bet that if either of these folks ever wished to
stop producing superb quality work, they would be better at being bad
or average than anyone else.
Luckily for us, they show no signs of wanting to do either. The
beneficiaries are ourselves and also, in this case, Celestial Arts of
Berkeley and Ten Speed Canada, who are handling publishing and
distribution of “Raising Boys” in North America.
“Raising Boys” offers an eminently readable overview of the
increasingly tricky task of bringing up sons—-who to begin with face
some sex-specific challenges--in an often imposing, dangerous, and all
too frequently unsympathetic or apathetic world. Biddulph laces his
appealing presentation with generous portions of humor, wisdom,
cartoons and drawings, presented in a variety of engaging formats, and
graced with a number of absorbing vignettes by outside writers. His
wife joins in to co-write the chapter on mothers and sons.
The author has some simple points to make. Few if any can say them as
bluntly and clearly as he does: “If you routinely work a fifty-five or
sixty-hour week, including travel times, you just won’t cut it as a
dad.” Boys need male teachers, but it has to be the right kind of
male, which means two basic qualities: 1) a mixture of warmth and
sternness, and 2) freedom from needing to prove anything and a comfort
with youthful exuberance. Intriguingly, Biddulph advocates starting to
include sexual words in dinner table conversation around age ten so
that sex does not get pushed underground for your boy.
I learned that young boys tend to have growth spurts that affect their
ear canals, and also that the language part of the brain is not fully
formed until age thirteen. Biddulph is a careful, creative wordsmith.
At one point, he writes that a boy who is turning into a man senses a
need to “download the software” from an available male to complete his
development. An adolescent, he notes bemusedly, is a role-seeking
missile.
The author may be too busy writing superlative books to go to many
recent films, as he laments the absence of “movie depictions of
tender, sensuous, playful and boisterous lovemaking.” Is it really
true, as Biddulph suggests, that in past times “men hit their wives
routinely”? (Without firm evidence, I personally tend to resist the
move to demonize the behavior of past humans relative to present
people.)
Biddulph goes into a rap about “creeps” a couple of times, by which he
means boys who haven’t learned to harness their sexual and aggressive
urges properly, so that instead those impulses emerge sideways in
forms that are hurtful to others. The author seems to alternate
between harshly judging these boys, and identifying or at least
understanding the pressure, stress and in some cases abuse that leads
boys to act this way. As readers, we can feel his ambivalence.
Steve Biddulph has specifics aplenty to offer readers, but in the end
it is not so much the truly invaluable advice and ideas but rather the
spirit and faith of the author that shines most brilliantly. The
writer makes this father of a nine-month-old son excited about what is
here and what is to come, anxious to go grab every moment available as
they slip away toward the future, plunging to the earth like so many
dominoes.
